My panel session at the Microsoft Summit this week got me thinking about the journey we’ve taken at SalesPreso, and the hurdles we’ve come up against over the years. So I’ve put words to my thoughts in this series of posts.
Startups learn new lessons almost daily, but I’d have to say that our biggest learning has been that we needed to be working with partners.
Until a year or so ago, we were focused on taking this amazing platform that we’d built and selling it directly to large organisations. We had very strong metrics from our foundation customers that we used as proof points that our technology worked—like a 135% increase in sales productivity leading to an average 43% revenue increase.
But tackling large organisations directly presented two challenges:
- Building a sales team big enough to tackle enterprise customers, especially with opportunities in the US and Europe.
- Addressing the custom requirements of enterprise organisations. Our platform is designed to integrate with any data source or sales process, but that means implementation and, therefore, more resources required internally.
A year on, we now partner with cloud service providers, systems integrators, sales training companies and content creators to address both of these challenges.
We’re achieving faster scale through our partners, but we’re also achieving the best customer outcomes by working with partners that already have knowledge and experience with their customers and expertise in existing industry tools.
So, perhaps finding the right partners is more important than finding partners, because it’s a genuine partnership; we extend our partners’ product offerings and that helps them to transform their customers’ performance.
Ultimately, this was a lesson we had to learn; that as a small, nimble company, we wanted to make sure we were great at what we did, but that partners make us even better.
What was your biggest learning in your business’s journey so far?
SalesPreso is a game-changing technology platform transforming enterprise B2B sales and advice by automating its single most time-consuming activity – creating customised presentations. Contact us to find out how SalesPreso can power your digital transformation.